I am working on a project that requires the generation of Bernoulli outcomes. Typically, I would go about this using the built in sample() function like so: This works great and is fast, even for large n. Problem is, I want to generate each sample with its own unique probability. ... [Read more...]

I recently posted the slides from a guest lecture that I gave on Bayesian methods for biologists/ecologist. In an effort to promote active learning, the class was not a straight forward lecture, but rather a combination of informational input from me and opportunities for students to engage with the ... [Read more...]

This is a talk I gave this week in Advanced Biostatistics at McGill. The goal was to provide an gentle introduction to Bayesian methodology and to demonstrate how it is used for inference and prediction. There is a link to an accompanying R script in the slides [Read more...]

Some people like to do crossword puzzles. I like to do machine learning puzzles. Lucky for me, a new contest was just posted yesterday on Kaggle. So naturally, my lazy Saturday was spent getting elbow deep into the data. The training set consists of a series of ‘skies’, each containing ... [Read more...]

Dispersal is a key process in many domains, and particularly in ecology. Individuals move in space, and this movement can be modelled as a random process following some kernel. The dispersal kernel is simply a probability distribution describing the distance travelled in a given time frame. Since space is continuous, ... [Read more...]

This image comes from the cover of Preliminary Papers of the Second International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (1989). Someone abandoned it in the lobby of my building at school. Whatever for, I’ll never know. I just love the idea of machine learning/AI/Statistics evoking a robot hand ... [Read more...]

A while ago I wrote this post with some R code to visualize the updating of a beta distribution as the outcome of Bernoulli trials are observed. The code provided a single plot of this process, with all the curves overlayed on top of one another. Then John Myles White (... [Read more...]

In his 2004 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Steven Peck argues: Simulation models can be used to mimic complex systems, but unlike nature, can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible, too costly or unethical to do in natural systems. Simulation can add to theory development and testing, ... [Read more...]

Why settle for just one realisation of this year’s UEFA Euro when you can let the tournament play out 10,000 times in silico? Since I already had some code lying around from my submission to the Kaggle hosted 2010 Take on the Quants challenge, I figured I’d recycle it for ... [Read more...]

Monday, April 30, 2012  14h-16h. Stewart Biology Rm w6/12 (Montreal) guRu: Denis Haine (Université de Montréal) Topics Reproducible research was first coined by Pr. Jon Claerbout, professor of geophysics at Stanford University, to describe that the results from researches can be replicated by other scientists by making available data, procedures, ... [Read more...]

At this Monday’s Montreal R User Group meeting, Arthur Charpentier gave an interesting talk on the subject of quantile regression. One of the main messages I took away from the workshop was that quantile regression can be used to determine if extreme events are becoming more extreme. The example ... [Read more...]

Stewart Biology Building, McGill University (Rm N4/17) Monday, April 24, 2012  14h-16h Dr. Arthur Charpentier (UQàM) In this workshop we will examine difference concepts related to quantiles, and practical issues based on R codes. This workshop will present quantile regression, and the idea of iterative least square estimation. It will ... [Read more...]

A few days ago, http://www.futilitycloset.com/ published a short post based on the fourth problem of the 1987 Canadian Mathematical Olympiad (from on a problem from the 6th All Soviet Union Mathematical Competition in Voronezh, 1966). The problem i... [Read more...]

This evening, while I was about to wash the dishes, I heard my elders starting a game (call them Him and Her) Him: "I have picked - in my head - a number, lower than 50. Try to guess..." Her: "No way, too difficult..." Him: "You can try five differ... [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion with a practitioner, working in some financial company, about ruin, and infinite time. And it remind me a weird result. Well, not a weird result, but a result I found disturbing, at first, when I was a stud... [Read more...]

Monday, March 26, 2012  14h-16h, Stewart Biology N4/17 Corey Chivers, Department of Biology McGill University This is a meetup of the Montreal R User Group. Be sure to join the group and RSVP. More information about the workshop here. Topics Why would we want to be Bayesian in the first place?  ... [Read more...]

Using R I'm doing a lot of simulations of the classic monty hall-problem and plotting multiple simulations using ggplot2. [Read more...]

In honour of π day (03.14 – can’t wait until 2015~) , I thought I’d share this little script I wrote a while back for an introductory lesson I gave on using Monte Carlo methods for integration. The concept is simple – we can estimate the area of an object which is inside another ... [Read more...]

If I google for “probability distribution” I find the following extremely bad picture: It’s bad because it conflates ideas and oversimplifies how variable probability distributions can generally be. Most distributions are not unimodal. Most dist... [Read more...]

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